Jersey Yogi: The Unintentional Enlightenment of an Uptight Man

Jersey

Yogi

Jersey Yogi

The Unintentional Enlightenment

of an Uptight Man

A Memoir

By

Jim Starr

Copyright © 2015 by Jim Starr

www.jerseyyogi.com

11th Dimension Publications

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

All rights reserved. Some names have been changed. Some material was originally published in Gangotri: Journey to the Source, published by 11th Dimension Publications, 2010

Cover and interior design by Damonza

Photography by Arne E. Arnesen

Edited by Gail M. Kearns and Margaret Diehl

ISBN-13: 978-0-9904493-0-0

LCCN: 2014913734

Distributed by Itasca Books

Printed in the United States of America

I dedicate this book to Swami Muktananda, my beloved guru.

With great respect and love, I welcome you all with all my heart.

– Swami Muktananda

If you have something to give, give it.

– Jersey Yogi

Contents

Prologue

Embarkation

And Then There Were Two

Give It Away

James Before Jane

Don Buys Scotch

The State Tourney

The Holy Land

The Tin Woodman

Every 15 Minutes

Coconut Milk

I’m Free

Not an Individual

I’ll Be There

Cow Dung

Bourgueil

I’m Swamiji!

Lunch Ends, Dinner Begins

Looking Good

The Purnahuti

Hare Rama, Hare Krishna

Venkateshwar

Spend Some Time

The Holy City

Benediction

The Holy City II

In the Flesh

The Holy City III

The Intensive

The Holy City IV

I Fly

Rishikesh

Rolfing

Gangotri

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

I felt, even heard, my back go out. I should have stopped right away, but this was the State Championship, and I was focused on winning. It was singles handball – first round of the tournament – and my opponent wasn’t very good. I should be able to beat him easily.

There is no way I’m going to lose a match to this moron. He’s never beaten me. I can’t move very well. Let’s get this over with quickly. Shit, it hurts – I can hardly bend over to pick up the ball. Play through the pain – rest your back later. I might be able to win this first game, but what about the second? God, it’s getting worse. FUCK!

It took all my self-discipline to concede the match in a civil way. I gritted my teeth as I shook my opponent’s hand and told him I couldn’t continue. As with many athletes, I felt the pain of defeat more intensely than the pain in my damaged body … at least initially.

But I had blown out my back, and it began screaming for attention, as it would for the next three years. I practically crawled out of the handball court.

My journey had begun.

Embarkation

It was India.

In 1985, I had six weeks to spend there. This was to include a couple of weeks’ stay at my guru’s ashram in the village of Ganeshpuri followed by a visit to the holy city of Varanasi, and some yet-to-be-defined program of trekking in the Himalayas. My wife Anne (who could stay only three weeks) was with me, as was my good friend Don, a bachelor and free spirit, who planned to remain in India until he felt good and ready to come home.

*

It sounds like an ordinary beginning to an ordinary story. But …

I was absolutely, definitively not the type to be doing this in the first place, this pilgrimage to India. In my heart of hearts (or at least the only heart I had ever really known) I was a stressed-out, cynical man. Born on the West Side of Manhattan, raised in New Jersey, I was intellectual, competitive, and hard-edged. I had zero tolerance for things I judged to be unscientific, trendy, or airy-fairy. Yoga, the New Age, and mysticism of any kind were far beneath me, as were the demented people who were aficionados of such bullshit. For me to have a guru was virtually unthinkable.

So, dear reader, please trust me as we start this story in the middle.

And Then There Were Two

I had been practicing Siddha Yoga, the path taught by world-famous Swami Muktananda, for five years. Anne had too, but in a much more casual, less-obsessed way. Don wasn’t particularly into it, but had nothing against it either, so when I invited him to come with us he was up for the adventure.

At the time, Anne and I had been married for 20 years. We had two teenage kids and a house in central New Jersey. The main Siddha Yoga ashram in the U.S. was located in South Fallsburg NY, about a two-hour drive from our home. It was a pretty long day-trip, but doable, and I made a point of spending as much time up there as I could, especially in the summers when the guru was in residence. Anne would join me now and then. In addition to day-trips, I would block out some vacation time in order to stay at the ashram for a full week or two. Once I even spent a month there.

Words can be funny. When I say, I had been practicing Siddha Yoga I’m conveying real information, but it sounds so dry compared to what that time was actually like for me. Kind of like saying I had been studying accounting. In fact Muktananda had initiated me into a completely new way of being, a transformed way of perceiving myself. Over the course of a lifetime I had built for myself some rather massive protective walls, and they had been breached. Having been showered with the grace of a master, I was now on the spiritual path. Imagine, me!!

*

Swami Muktananda, my beloved Baba, had actually passed away three years earlier, in October of 1982. I vividly remember the phone call from my friend Hesh, another devotee: There’s news from India. Baba died last night.

In yogic lore, the death of a master is (supposedly) a joyous rather than a sad event, and is known as mahasamadhi, the great oneness. Since the master is no longer limited by the confines of a body, he is totally free to roam the universe in service of his devotees. He is thus even more powerful and accessible. He hasn’t died; he has left his body. He has taken mahasamadhi.

*

Yogic lore aside, Baba was gone, and I was devastated. This teacher, who had already changed my life radically (and I had just begun), would be heard from no more. Could I walk this spiritual path without him?

It’s traditional to pay lavish tribute to a master when he dies, often in the form of chanting his name for extended periods. Hesh informed me that the chant had already begun at all of Baba’s ashrams, and was to last a full month.

There was a Siddha Yoga ashram in Manhattan, about an hour away, and I decided to go there immediately and join the chant. I was so sad. My 12-year old son, Lionel, who had met Baba a couple of times, said he wanted to come with me. It was about 9:00pm and I told him he was very welcome to come, but that there was no telling when we might get back. He didn’t care.

We went to the chant, stayed a few hours, and got home shortly before dawn. At the ashram it didn’t seem to me that anyone was particularly joyful. In fact, some people were practically choking on the words of the chant. I know I was.

*

With Baba’s death the leadership of Siddha Yoga had been instantly passed to his two successors. These successors had been handpicked by Baba, and were actually brother and sister. Their names were Swami Nityananda, the brother (nickname: Gurudev), and Swami Chidvilasananda, the sister (nickname: Gurumayi). These two young swamis had been formally installed by Baba as gurus in a gigantic ceremony held in India in May of 1982, a few months prior to Baba’s passing, an event that had triggered apprehension in many of the devotees: Does he know he’s going to die soon? Maybe he did.

In any event, Baba had said that the installation ceremony marked his retirement as guru, and that we were now to follow his new successors. No one took him very seriously because as long as he was around he would always be the man. As Gurumayi said, He can’t just stop guru-ing!

Nevertheless he did actually fade more into the background, and the two new gurus, the kids, began to lead all the programs. They traveled a lot, sometimes together, sometimes separately, and were each honored and respected as gurus wherever they went. Most devotees found it at least a bit confusing to now relate to two gurus rather than one, and many developed a preference for one or the other, but all in all the Siddha Yoga community took the succession, and the choice of successors, pretty much in stride.

We learned that both gurus would be at the Ganeshpuri Ashram when we arrived in October, 1985.

Give It Away

I knew no one in Siddha Yoga who didn’t want to visit the Ganeshpuri ashram. It was, after all, the main ashram, the one established by Baba himself in the hometown of his own revered guru, Bhagavan Nityananda. It was the world headquarters of Siddha Yoga and was said, by those who had been there, to be a spiritual paradise. Within its walls, transformation was a sure thing.

I certainly wanted to go. The awakening I had experienced when Baba came into my life had always felt mysteriously exotic to me, a quality that struck me as somehow having its roots in India. So for me this trip was not at all about sightseeing; it was a return to source, a pilgrimage.

And what better time to go than October, when the mahasamadhi celebration would be in full swing? It was the third anniversary of Baba’s death and was thus an extremely auspicious time to visit. It would be crowded, but the festivities would be magnificent, and would feature, among other things, a weeklong saptah (chant) in Baba’s honor.

Anne was very happy that we were going, but would never have suggested the trip on her own. Don was just rolling with the punches.

*

When it came to travelling, Anne and I were pretty loose about planning. We had taken a number of trips to Europe before (mostly France), and had done so without having established much of an itinerary for any of them. We would generally hit the road armed with just a rental car, a good road map, and the red Michelin Guide. Since we had only a vague notion of where we’d be at any given time, we never had room reservations.

Typically we would fly Icelandic Airlines (the cheapest) to Luxembourg, rent a tiny car, and be off. The small airport, just north of the French border, was never busy.

This method suited us. We had the freedom to go anywhere and do anything, and to keep whatever pace fit our mood at the time. For me it also heightened the buzz of excitement that always accompanied the perceived low-level danger of being in a foreign country.

As to planning, this trip would be not much different. We had booked our plane tickets and our ashram lodging in advance, but everything else was pretty much open-ended. After a two weeks’ visit to the ashram, we would fly to Varanasi and stay … we knew not where. While there we would do whatever, and in a week Anne would return home. Don and I would then go trekking somewhere in the Himalayas.

We had heard that the best trekking was actually in Nepal, and at least had had the foresight to acquire the visas necessary to enter that country. This felt to me at the time like a rather major coup in planning.

I knew very little about hiking, much less trekking, and had never owned a backpack or even a pair of hiking boots. When Don informed me that such equipment would be 100% necessary for this trip, I offered no resistance. I bought the stuff, and having been told that hiking boots always require a period of breaking-in, went with Anne for a couple of practice hikes in a local NJ park with our friends Rich and Nancy. The boots seemed fine right from the beginning, and this reinforced my long-held view that people tend to overestimate the difficulty and danger of their endeavors.

*

During this period of my life, I was making my living doing Rolfing, a form of deep-tissue bodywork, loosely akin to massage, and named after its founder, Dr. Ida P. Rolf (1896-1979). My office was in a loft on the west side of Manhattan where my dear friend Isis lived. Isis was a bodyworker too, and practiced a form she had developed herself.

She was a born healer, and had the innate grace and flow of the proverbial New Age goddess. Her work was formidable. Everyone in the know had to have a session with Isis, and it was not uncommon for celebrities to show up at her little loft.

She had befriended me, even though I was very rough around the edges and was essentially brand new to the world of spirituality. Metaphysically speaking, I was a kid taking tap lessons, and she was Fred Astaire. But we had a great connection, one that ran deeper than appearances.

The loft was an upbeat place, a place where interesting people would gather whether or not they had come for bodywork. One day Isis took a large glass jar and taped a note to it that said in big letters GIVE IT AWAY. She placed it on the mantel. When people saw it for the first time they would say something like "What’s that for? Isis would always answer, I don’t know. Give it away!" People loved this silliness, and started putting money into the jar.

After a while there came to be quite a sum in there and Isis told me she had started thinking about finding a good way to use it. I had an idea. Look, I’m going to India soon and there are lots of people there who need money. I’ll take it, and find a good way to donate it. Isis readily agreed, and when I left for India I had about $150 to give away.

James Before Jane

I live with intense fear. When it comes up, it’s usually around women whom I perceive as angry or disapproving. It’s present only a small fraction of the time, but when I’m in it I experience what feels like life-threatening danger. I’ve made it a quest to get beyond this irrational fear, and perhaps discover its source along the way.

My mother told me that when I was an infant she had been severely depressed. She slept most of the time, and when she did, I slept too. I almost never cried – not normal for a little baby. It was as if I was already very afraid of making waves.

In all the personal work I’ve done around this issue, the relationship with my mother has always seemed the place to start, since this fear is woman-related. But I’ve looked many times at my history with her and have never recalled an incident that could have triggered massive fear. On the contrary, I don’t even remember a time when she was actually angry with me. Yes, she was a controlling person, but I have nothing but fond memories of Mom and the way she treated me. Hence people tend to suggest that the trauma, if there was one, was preverbal.

Recently I’ve had some success in taking myself far back in time to get a look at the earliest possible me. When I do this the following imagery arises:

I’m a tiny embryonic being floating in vast empty bright yellow space. I don’t want anything, and don’t deserve anything. I’ve completely deadened myself to feelings, except for a low-level terror that seems normal and doesn’t bother me. I’m a solitary one-celled thing that will never experience anything but this floating numbness. I’ve become very used to it.

*

Except for the first five years of my life (which we spent in New York City), I grew up in Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey. Only 30 minutes from the Lincoln Tunnel to midtown Manhattan, it was surprisingly rural at the time. The street we lived on, Ute Avenue, was just a small dirt road.

When I was nine years old and about to enter 4th grade, the powers-that-be decided that a handful of students would need to be bussed to a fairly distant part of the township rather than attend the neighborhood school. I’m not sure, but I suppose there was a problem with overcrowding. I was to be one of the bussed. Instead of going to Parsippany School, I would take two busses to Mount Tabor School, where I knew none of the other students. In addition, although there were two 4th grade classes at the new school, one of them had room for only one bussed student while the other handled the rest. I was the one, and so began 4th grade without a single friend in my class.

I was also isolated due to my age. Having gone to kindergarten in New York City I had begun school a year earlier than kids usually did in New Jersey, and was roughly a year younger than everyone else. On my first day at Mount Tabor School, Arlene Barrett, whose desk was next to mine, asked me how old I was. When I replied nine, she said "Boy, you must be stupid!" I said nothing.

I was a stiff, scared little boy. An only child, very smart, and always greatly in need of approval, I was very much the teacher’s pet type. I carried with me a brown leather briefcase inside of which I had a cherished article, a miniature red stapler known as a Tot 50. Annie Crumpacker got to know me and began to covet my Tot 50. She once asked me if she could borrow it and I flatly refused. Many years later, after she had become my